Tuscaloosa city schools examined in national article that says segregation has come full circle

Wednesday

Apr 16, 2014 at 11:00 PMApr 17, 2014 at 12:37 AM

An article released today by New York City-based nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica traces the history of how the Tuscaloosa City School System went from segregation, to desegregation and ultimately to resegregation.

By Jamon SmithStaff Writer

An article released today by New York City-based nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica traces the history of how the Tuscaloosa City School System went from segregation, to desegregation and ultimately to resegregation.The 14-page piece titled “Segregation Now ... ” was written by investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who spent a year working on the story. It will appear today in The Atlantic magazine and on the websites http://www.propublica.org/ and http://www.theatlantic.com/.Hannah-Jones conducted more than 50 interviews in Tuscaloosa, spending two months in the city researching school and court documents, old newspaper articles and other sources.The article includes detailed accounts of how the system used neighborhood schools and rezoning to circumvent the desegregation court order; how Central High School became one of the most dominant schools in the state when it opened as the system’s integrated and only high school; how white flight reduced the system’s numbers by thousands after desegregation; how an alleged backroom deal cut between the city’s business leaders, elected officials and some of its most influential black leaders led to a federal judge overturning the system’s 30-year desegregation order; and how resegregation followed.“I think getting the motivations on the record behind breaking up Central and the rezoning was the most important part of this,” Hannah-Jones said. “The officials said neighborhood schools were most important, but (neither) Central nor Northridge are neighborhood schools. People had long suspected that a deal had been cut. The decision to break up the schools was planned long in advance before the judge issued the desegregation order.”Tuscaloosa City School System Superintendent Paul McKendrick said he was aware that the article was coming out, but he hasn’t read it yet.Hannah-Jones said she became interested in school resegregation while spending a year and a half investigating housing segregation. She saw a link between the two that she wanted to explore, particularly in the South.In the initial stages of her research, Hannah-Jones came across a study by Stanford University that showed that within three years of being released from court desegregation orders, many school systems started resegregating.“So I contacted the Stanford researchers and I asked them where are the districts that have resegregated most rapidly,” she said. “They sent me a list of the top 10 and Tuscaloosa was on that list. Tuscaloosa wasn’t the worst on the list, but it was among the worst in the country.”She chose Tuscaloosa City Schools over the other nine because it’s in the South, the system still has white students and it hasn’t been extensively written about nationally.“Tuscaloosa really interested me because it was small enough to intimately tell a story, and that it had gone from one high school (Central) with perfect integration — not perfect as in flawless, but perfect because all students went to the same school — to three high schools,” she said.“I was interested that Tuscaloosa had found a solution to segregation that had worked, and I wanted to know why it had gone away from that. And of course, Tuscaloosa has a lot of history with the ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Doors’ and Alabama being the cradle of the civil rights movement.”The article is one of three resegregation stories Hannah-Jones said she plans to write.The next two will focus on school resegregation in the Midwest and Northeast — the most segregated regions of the country, she said — and how school resegregation has affected Latinos.

Reach Jamon Smith at jamon.smith@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0204.

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